Rhythm Hunter HarmoKnight Is the Best 3DS Game You Can’t Play

Downloadable games on Nintendo’s platforms have always felt like a side dish, good but but not nearly as filling as the cartridge games. Rhythm Hunter HarmoKnight is the first digital game on 3DS that feels like a main course. This musical adventure is the kind of thing that would have been sold on a cartridge on the old DS hardware. It’s got a lot of gameplay, a serious amount of polish and a novel, compelling gameplay mechanic that ties it all together.

Oh, and you can’t play it, because it’s only on the Japanese 3DS eShop for now. So unless you are crazy like me and bought a Japanese 3DS, you’re locked out until Nintendo of America gets in gear.

In answer to the question that many of you have asked: I do think that HarmoKnight will be released outside Japan in short order. In fact, I’d be quite surprised if it wasn’t localized into English during the development process, and the only thing Nintendo of America is waiting on is to have a proper marketing push for it prior to its release. So before all that happens, let me just tell you: It’s awesome. Any music game fan is going to want this.

What resulted was a game well outside of Game Freak’s wheelhouse. It’s a platformer in which the main character constantly runs forward, and you just jump and attack enemies. The catch is that you have to do this to the beat of the musical tracks. If you don’t follow the rhythm, you’ll find it’s quite difficult to avoid everything. Also, everything you do — jumping, attacking, collecting musical notes — adds to the music. So playing expertly creates a more pleasing soundtrack.

Your success at the game is measured in how many musical notes that you collect in each level. You get these by picking them up, but also by hitting enemies.

HarmoKnight is absolutely fastidious about timing, especially when it comes to attacking enemies: If you’re a bit off, you’ll knock the enemy away but not get a musical note for your efforts. The approach of enemies is telegraphed musically, but sometimes they come so fast and so furious that memorizing the level is the only way you’re likely to clear them all out.

At the end of a level, you’ll be given one of three grades: So-so, Good, and Great. The top two levels give you a King Music Note, which allow you to keep progressing through the blockers on the world map.

But, as all music gamers know, “good” is a Japanese word meaning “shameful.” So at this point, you’d go back into the level to try to do better and get a Great, represented by a golden flower. And once you’ve done that, there’s still another challenge. If you press the Y button, you’ll leave the world map and go into a list of every level, and you’ll be able to play a sped-up version of each one.

So for a while, I wasn’t able to advance — and it wasn’t the game that was stopping me but my own gamer-OCD — until I had gold-flowered every level in the previous world. Eventually I gave up on this, not only because the game had gotten significantly more difficult but because there’s no reward for any of it. I think this is one of HarmoKnight‘s big missteps — it’s fun as hell to play the levels, but there’s no reward for clearing out entire worlds with all Greats. No extra levels, no nothing.

Something else that seems a little off: I initially thought that HarmoKnight was being amazingly stingy with the Greats toward the end of the game. As it turns out, I was completely missing a key feature: You can not only hit enemies, but also the musical instrument-shaped plants in the background, to earn more notes. In fact, the hero Tempo even has a “charge attack” — you can hold down the attack button and release it to let loose a thwack that shakes two notes out of the plants.

This makes getting Greats far easier, but the game never actually tells you about these moves in the tutorial! I only found out about them accidentally, when I was swinging my staff aimlessly in the middle of a level. Then I went to the game’s digital instruction manual (who reads those?!) and learned about the charge move. I nearly got through the entire game without ever knowing about it.

HarmoKnight would be a fine game if the running-music mechanic were all it had to offer, but it ups the ante with its intermittent boss battles. These are call-and-response music games, quite similar to Sega’s classic (and now nearly forgotten) Space Channel 5 series. Dynamic camera angles and cinematic action ensue as you press the A and B buttons along with directions on the D-pad in short bursts after the enemy attacks you.

These require such impeccable timing that I simply wasn’t able to play them with enough precision using my thumbs. I actually found that the only way I was able to play these levels with 100% accuracy (which in this case is actually necessary for a Great, unless I’m missing another feature) was to put the 3DS on a table and precisely tap the face buttons in a staccato rhythm with my index finger.

In the case of these levels, I think HarmoKnight‘s miniature timing windows may work to its detriment; sometimes it felt a bit too much like work to nail the rhythms. That said, these levels are great fun — if you have fond memories of Space Channel 5, you’ll wonder how you got by all this time without music games like this.

I do have one unqualified complaint. My fiancée would love to play HarmoKnight, but there’s only one save file. So she can’t start a new game without deleting my current one. I believe the correct word for this is “horseshit.” There’s no reason to do this other than screwing families into having to buy two 3DS units and two copies of the game.

Rhythm Hunter HarmoKnight is a downloadable game, but it ain’t cheap: The Japanese version costs 1800 yen, which points to a $19.99 price for the U.S. Don’t get too sticker-shocked, though. This is a great addition to the relatively small genre of character-based music games. The skillful combination of the music and platforming genres might even help it break out of the typical audience for that category.